Discovering My Writing Process (Or, Rethinking My Semester)

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     After finishing Project 3 last week, I have now made it to the final project for ENG 109H: the self-reflection. For this project, I will be looking back on the three to four months that I have attended this English class and will consider how I have grown from all of the projects that I have done so far. Thus, to begin, I will observe how my writing process changed over time.  

     Even during my years in high school, I always was a heavy planner when it came to writing. I always spent excessive amounts of time looking for the perfect sources and examples to use for my papers, spent even more hours thinking about how I was going to outline my points and my evidences for them, spent EVEN MORE hours writing each sentence down and making sure that each sentence and paragraph flowed smoothly, and spent usually one more hour proofreading to ensure quality. Therefore, because I already poured so much time into preparing that one draft, hoping that, for my second and third drafts, I did not need to make too many revisions, I would often tire of looking at my draft when I do have to revise it; and I often do not want to make another draft, lest I repeat the same process as before. 

     To counteract this tendency of mine, I tried to combine my attributes as a heavy planner with the attributes of a heavy reviser to find the right balance in my writing. Especially in my most recent project, I looked back at my blog posts and figured out which paragraphs were too weak, erased them, and rewrote them while keeping aware of the errors I made before. I was willing to hear advice from my peers and worked with the advice, making the necessary alterations, no matter how drastic. I was going to revise my things sooner or later; so why not now? By combining both attributes, I was able to see the mistakes I made in my first draft, the draft that I often think is perfect the way it is, and correct them; and I also gained the patience to go a little bit further when it came to revising. 

     I would dare say that Project 2 definitely changed how I approached writing rhetorical analyses. With many of my writings, I always wrote as if I was referring to the general public. However, after learning that even the most "general" things have a certain audience, I had to completely change my perspective on things. Especially with Project 2, I had to analyze how a certain commercial appealed to its target audience and why exactly the commercial appealed to them instead of assuming that everyone would be affected by it. I also had to dig deeper into the strategies that were used in the commercials--in other words, I had to draw not only observations, but also inferences. I could not just identify the logos; I needed to also find the pathos and the ethos of the argument as well. In a sense, you could say that my approach to writing was simultaneously narrowed and broadened. 

     My writing process is still mostly the same today as it was before: begin with sources, generally outline the paper, find evidence for those points in the sources, consider how I was going to mold those evidences into a coherent paper, and write the first draft, making sure to stay grammatically correct. Today, though, I now include revising during and after writing the first draft to ensure quality in each paragraph and a little pre-writing as well. I follow the same strategy, regardless of what paper it is. 

     Over the course of the semester, there were two things that helped me a lot while writing: the observations-inferences chart (to help with looking for the deeper meaning or reason for a certain rhetorical strategy's presence in a medium) and the cluster graph (to make connections concerning who is speaking about a topic, what they are saying about that topic, how they are saying whatever they wanted to say, and why they chose to say what they said). I will definitely try to implement these two pre-writing tools in other papers that I may have in the future.